Gender Questions

In 2011, Miss Sahhara, a transgender woman from Nigeria with UK refugee status, was crowned First Princess at the world’s largest and most prestigious beauty pageant for transgender women—Miss International Queen. The then Cultural Minister of Nigeria when contacted for comment responded that if she was transgender, she could not be Nigerian, and if she was Nigerian, she could not be transgender—a tacit denial of her very existence. In recent years, LGBT people “fleeing Africa” to the “Global North” has become a common media trope. Responses to this, emanating from a variety of African voices, have provided a more nuanced reading of sexuality. What has been absent from these readings has been the role of gender expression, particularly a consideration of transgender experiences. I understand transgender refugees to have taken up “lines of flight” such that, in a Deleuzian sense, they do not only flee persecution in countries of origin but also recreate or speak back to systems of control and oppressive social conditions. Some transgender people who have left, like Miss Sahhara, have not gone silently, using digital means to project a new political visibility of individuals, those who are both transgender and African, back at the African continent. In Miss Sahhara’s case, this political visibility has not gone unnoticed in the Nigerian tabloid press. Drawing on the story of Miss Sahhara, this paper maps these flows and contraflows, asking what they might reveal about configurations of nationhood, gender and sexuality as they are formed at both the digital and physical interstices between Africa and the Global North.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the poor socio-economic and political conditions in India facilitated the migration of both indentured and free or “passenger” Indians to Natal, South Africa. The latter unencumbered by contractual labour arrived under normal immigration laws and hence were referred to as “passenger” Indians. Whilst the “push” and “pull” factors of indentured Indians to some extent have been documented, this has been largely absent for “passenger” Indians. This article examines male-centred “passenger” Indian migration in the context of gender, the rural household and economy in western India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper highlights that the male outmigration to a very large extent was governed by two factors: gender relations within the household and women’s role in the rural economy. Women were left behind in the towns and villages not because they were absent from the decision-making process during migration, but because their domestic activities were central in augmenting the rural household. This article obliterates the myth of the “passive” and “docile” female in historical migrations in the Indian diaspora by shifting the migration narratives from the traditional ports of settlement to the untapped ports of departure to acquire better insights to historical “push” factors that facilitated “passenger” Indian migration. It makes the colonial rural household, of which women were an integral part, the centre of analysis, thereby providing new perspectives on gender relations and how they shaped and influenced male-centred migration.

Drawing on field research and a survey of 150 Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, this paper explores the dimensions of migrants’ transnational experiences in the urban space. I discuss the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook as well as other means such as telephone calls in fostering the embedding of transnational migrants within both the Johannesburg and the Zimbabwean socio-economic environments. I engage this migrant-embedding using Bourdieusian concepts of “transnational habitus” and “transnational social field,” which are migration specific variations of Bourdieu’s original concepts of “habitus” and “social field.” In deploying these Bourdieusian conceptual tools, I observe that the dynamics of South–South migration as observed in the Zimbabwean migrants are different to those in the South–North migration streams and it is important to move away from using the same lens in interpreting different realities. For Johannesburg-based migrants to operate within the socio-economic networks produced in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, they need to actively acquire a transnational habitus. I argue that migrants’ cultivation of networks in Johannesburg is instrumental, purposive, and geared towards achieving specific and immediate goals, and latently leads to the development and sustenance of flexible forms of permanency in the transnational urban space.